directed by Eva Grace
Mullaley
performed by Zac
James, Mathew Cooper, Shakara Walley and Amy Smith
Blue Room Theatre
9 – 13 July, 2013
Shakara Walley (pic: Ashley de Prazer) |
Seven young writers (four of whom also perform) have
taken up the challenge of creating short theatre pieces with the overarching
theme of the river, and the result – brought together as Yirra Yaarnz – is
diverse, compelling and insightful.
Much credit is due to the dramaturg Hellie Turner and
project manager Irma Woods for a fine job of tending the material, and the
director Eve Grace Mullaley and designer Daniel Ampuero for giving it an
understated yet focused staging. The four actors, all graduates of WAAPA’s
Aboriginal Theatre course, give clear, measured performances with much
emotional subtlety.
The Welcome to Country is an integral, though
sometimes under-appreciated, part of indigenous performance. Barry McGuire, a Balladong Noongar man of the Wadjuk
Country, gave an often very funny Welcome that emphasised the significance of yarn
spinning to all Australian cultures, including its oldest.
These Yirra
Yaarnz are not campfire tales or myths and legends, though, but authentic insights
into Aboriginal life, the damage it has suffered and the strengths that sustain
it.
What results
can be brutal, as is Andrea Fernandez’s rape story, fiercely performed by
Shakara Walley, or whimsical, like Rayma Morrison’s Kurrajong, but each piece
is about the things that make up life.
It’s easy
to compare this writing for the stage with that of Tim Winton, whose Signs of
Life and, inevitably, Cloudstreet, travel some like paths.
It’s not an
odious comparison. At their best, a chilling moment in Amy Smith’s superb
Tilly’s Mono when the river water becomes still over the narrator’s diving son,
there’s a universe of foreboding and rising grief (happily, this time, averted)
that, like Winton’s best, draws you into the contemplative silence at the heart
of art.
Walley is
magnificent in Tilly’s Mono, and powerful and stately throughout. Smith is a
sharp, alert actor with a neat playfulness that serves her well in Zac James’s flirtatious
Torn Scene 1 and Walley’s sardonic Basil. James and the cast’s other
writer/performer, Matthew Cooper, are convincing and charismatic in all their
pieces.
Last year’s
Yirra Yaakin production at the Blue Room, Black Like Michael Jackson, lost
something by sometimes re-stating the obvious about the indigenous experience. I
have no such qualms about the courageous and finely wrought Yirra Yaarnz.
An edited version of this review appeared in The West Australian 11.7.13
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